On 4th July last, five British women were arrested for pulling up genetically engineered (GE) plants at a Monsanto test site in Oxfordshire. These were the first GE arrests in Britain, though there have been at least 22 other attempts to destroy British GE test sites so far this year. Some of these so-called "decontaminations" have occurred secretly at night (on June 4th/5th, six whole sites were destroyed), while others have taken place in broad daylight, sometimes even under the eyes of the police.

Despite a heavy police presence at the Oxfordshire site, the women managed to pull up almost 200 GE plants before being gently escorted away. They were later released after an amicable half-an-hour at the police station, and are currently waiting to see whether charges will be pressed against them.

The women are part of a new campaign of "nonviolent civil responsibility" called "genetiX snowball", which aims to kickstart a popular and peaceful mass movement against GE in food and agriculture. Transparency is genetiX snowball's unusual main tactic. In this case, the women publicly informed Monsanto, the police and the press of their intentions to pull up a symbolic number of GE plants, clearly stating their reasons for doing so. This contrasts with the many clandestine attempts to destroy British GE crop trials.

"Both styles have their advantages, and can co-exist," observes one of the arrested women, Jo Hamilton. "The point of pulling up the crops over night is basically to stop the experiments. What we're trying to do is to get more people involved. The advantage of snowball is that it does open the debate out much more, and more people can become empowered to actually get involved in directly pulling up the crop, because it is much less risky - even though we're being so open - if a large number of people are doing a small amount of damage. Then the actual fines and penalties hopefully will be less.

"By empowering as many people as possible to do this, I think we can spread the amount of resistance to GE crops and the amount of direct resistance to them as well, and that can be a very powerful statement to the government and the companies, that so many ordinary, concerned people really care about the future food supply enough to break the law."

Hamilton and the other women - who include a freelance journalist, a music teacher, a furniture maker and a solicitor - believe that awareness around the GE issue is growing.

"It's up to the people who know about it to stand up and shout about it," she says, "and explain to other people that if action is not taken, then multinational companies will be commercially growing GE foods in the next two years in Britain. And then it'll be too late to stop it, because once GE foods are released into the environment, there's no turning back, the damage will be done.

"There is a red light flashing - it's very urgent and very imminent, and we've got to do something soon". n